Happy 'Hope'y Year!

Its almost time for a brand new year. But I guess a little flashback is going to be good for the system.

A lot has happened some good, some very good and well, some just about the regular fare that life dishes out. My elder sister gave birth to a beautiful baby girl and I don’t think I can thank God enough. Also, my mom is getting steadily and slowly better from her illness and it’s a strange feeling to be able to hope again, for her I mean.

Amongst other happy things, ahem, a friend, after remaining a pretty single for 24 years has finally decided to give love a shot, and while she says its still not love, what she means is, she is going with the flow and is enjoying whatever it is. I, of course have predicted greater things…

Nandu left for UK and that was like a punch in the stomach. But trust Nandu to do things differently. There is a mail almost every week from her and the pretty lass even sent a beautiful postcard from Falmouth. It is impossible to outdo her in caring for someone. Miss her and somehow, don’t miss her at all.
Love wise, things were like a river, flowing just that much. Comfortable and a breeze. Mature I am getting, is it?
Traveled a lot and even left the country in one of my trips. Wowie!!

Time for one of those I-am-thankful and I-will-remember lists. Here goes:


•Awesome friends, I didn’t fight the whole year!
•Stepping into a more serious relationship than ever. The funniest part is, the more serious it is getting, the lighter am feeling.
•Eating to my heart’s delight, knowing the coming year maybe a very different one.
•Music, movies and theatre, I love them all.
•Traveling too much, may the streak never break.
•Things stopped hurting that much. Infact, I could even smile about some of them.
•The job still sucks, but am doing quite fine, thank you.
•MJ died, and Lisa Ray is sick. I remember spending umpteen afternoons dancing to Beat It and Afreen, couldn’t have enough of these guys. Sigh.
•Gucci and my fight for his survival. Almost like one of those dog-human movies, we beat the odds again and again. Couldn’t do it without a few people though. To them!
•Too much merry making + too much being yourself = trouble. Point noted.
•Exes make for difficult friends. Especially if they are still not over it. Point noted again.
•Twilight happened and I realized out of all the scary creatures, vampires manage to make my knees go weak. Though werewolves are my type. Period.
•Experiencing a long distance relationship. Comments reserved. All I will say, however, is that I am getting there.

So in a nutshell or a coconut shell, that was my life this year. Probably a more tame one since the last few years, but I aint complaining. Life should be wild, tame and all things nice. Here is to wishing that 2010 will be a joyride!

What's age gotta do with it?!

There was a time when I was super young. Like, really, literally young. If I ever fell in love with a sitcom actor (which I repeatedly did) I would imdb about him and wow I could see his date of birth and it was almost always four to seven years older than I was. And there on, I could dream about him. Happily.

Cut to now. Everytime I now try to imdb a new actor I like (for instance, the Twilight actors) they are always two to three years younger! And I lose my fantasy filled frenzy just like a glass of not-had Pepsi. The worst happened when this very cute actor I looked for turned out to be a 1992 born!!!! I mean, come on, who is born in the 90s?! sigh.

I have come to the conclusion that I will not imdb anymore. I didn’t realize at what point of time in life did I leave the cute cradle behind and became the cradle snatcher instead . Tcha!

A revelation

I have since long been looking at ways to be free. It has been a long long time now. Every year, I decide, now I am this many years old. Surely, I can be free now? Or atleast freer than what I am now? And well, the kind of freedom I ache for evades me.
Now is the time though. Suddenly, its not only at sight, its very very easy even. I can see the ways to be free. I have found not one, but two such glorious ways to be so, to be content in the ‘now’, to be able to realize the bigger picture, like one would say.
I am hoping I am not lazy in its wake. I am hoping I take the best of it and become very powerful in my reality, the master of moi thoughts. It seems just around the corner now. It feels too good to be true.
But then, unlike other times, it is really, actually, true.

Dil, sad titli

Feeling extremely melancholic. Its got nothing to do with affairs outside of myself, but something going on within. Have I said it enough times that I don’t like winters? Yes I am getting better at liking it and coping with it, but on days when it gets to me, I become really hopeless. People shouldn’t be such extremes. It seems like the end of the world on days like these.

The dark grey gloom that is everywhere in the sky absolutely kills the happy oxygen in my blood. Instead, something weird takes over. A longing, an unnamed thing which I want but don’t know how to get…Maybe I believe in tragedy too much. I believe in unrequited love and I totally believe that one is never the same after love has touched you.

Of course, there are different kinds of love. And you never love a different person in the same way. There is a new love, a new kind of emotion attached with a new person. But it is always different. And it’s a good thing that it is different, otherwise the comparisons would be too many to count and too difficult to overlook. It is a good thing that nothing is the same.

Everything is beautiful in its own special way. The love, the separation, the time alone, the tragedy that overwhelms you, the feeling of being on your own, and then the happiness. Each phase is beautiful, unique in itself. And it is good to know that books reflect you so totally sometimes. It makes you believe that somewhere in the world, each person is feeling one of these things, and imagining themselves to be the only one going through that. When I was lonely and sad, I thought I would die. And I thought the numbness would claim the whole of me. And now when I am happy, nothing really touches me, it’s a fleeting emotion, this everyday life. Things hurt on and off, but they don’t mess me up. But when am vulnerable, everything can attack, everything can hurt.

People around me have nothing to do with it. Not even things, situations, emotions. Its just something within, playing havoc.

Human spirit in all its glory!

A lot of good things have happened over the few months and I am smiling. However, with all the good things in life, also come the retrospective things. Those which remind you of who you are, of what things could be, of how one should be.

My didi had a baby this month and is staying with us. So it became important that my pet Gucci left for some other place for the time being. We couldn’t find many takers because Gucci isn’t keeping well and needs medicines twice a day. The kennels are freaking expensive, to say nothing of the fact that I will be shit worried keeping him with a bunch of strangers.

So yeah, after seeing our plight, our house help came to the rescue. She loves Gucci and volunteered to keep him for a few months at her own place. She lives in Govindpuri (theres a cool little jhuggi down there) and I asked her if I could come see him sometimes. She happily agreed.

Yesterday, I was told Gucci refused to eat twice and my alarm went off. In the evening I rushed with my maid to her place, only to be told that while she was at our place, she kept Gucci at her mamaji’s house, which was only two doors away. So we crept up in thin alleys, crossed open drains, walked over two cats’ tails due to the darkness and finally leapt up a steep set of stairs where she knocked on a small chipped green door. And Gucci’s barks bellowed from inside. After two minutes, a much hassled mamiji opened the door and the sight my eyes met with, is probably life changing.

The room was as big as a Maruti 800 car’s interiors. More than half of the room had a high wooden bed that had a lot of space under it. That is where they kept all their clothes, utensils, paper, odd objects etc. Next to the door was a small gas, and in one of the gas corners, Gucci’s leash was tied. On the bed sat a tall lanky boy and a tall girl, the kids of the family I am guessing.

It was amazing. There lived four people inside this mousehole. And they cared enough to take a dog with them! To feed him, to give him medicines, to take care of him the whole day. If Gucci went wild with happiness, he could rip that room apart in just five seconds. And yet, this family laughed, told me tales about what Gucci was upto lately and also made a sad face when I told them I will take him home by the end of the year.

I had gone to meet Gucci cursing my luck for keeping him apart, for having to entrust him on people who are, least said, not doing so well themselves. And if I may add, I was upset for having to keep him at my maid’s place.

But all that vanished when I left that place. I was instead overcome by how great the human spirit can be, if the heart is in the right place. I realized Gucci couldn’t have been more loved than this. A family low on rice and roti was sharing theirs with him. Ofcourse I gave some money to them for his weekly kharcha, but that didn’t add an ich to what they were doing for me in return.

I sort of sat in between, very close to everything that was on the floor including the kids who were now standing instead of being on the bed. I cuddled Gucci for a while and they looked very anxiously at me for a reaction. I only gave them grateful smiles. Because they deserved that. And God knows, so much more than that.

Gurgaon then.

Noida now.

:|

Feeling lonely amongst friends

More and more friends are getting married. The social scene is changing in a way I never thought possible even a year back. Weren’t we in high school just that day? I was putting nail polish and J scolded me. J who was my best friend and also the head girl, she always had to let me pass without any punishment for my wayward behavior and only because, we were buddies. Those younger kids in the bus, swooning over posters of Leonardo Di Caprio that they bought from Archies with their pocket money, how very naïve they seemed even then! When they bunked school one day even after boarding the bus, I decided school bunkers weren’t cool. And in a few years’ time, when I was in college, I bunked three classes every week to go watch a movie with my boyfriend. Sigh. So much for ‘never’.

In college, the chai under the big tree of my old college canteen was like a flight to intellectual freedom, the kinds that came as a natural to my course. We would discuss movies, projects, even the last episode of the OC over plastic cups of tea and a cigarette or two. Leaving for home late into the afternoon, I would go home and tell Ma how we had seven lectures that day! Lying was such a trend, sometimes to be out with him, on other days, to simply hang out with friends, lying was a natural way of being in college. And it never felt wrong. It only felt ‘cool’.

Soon work life happened. And I took to it as efficiently as I took to books once upon a time. The friends I met at work somehow echoed the similarities we had as today’s generation and they became more than just colleagues. First job, then a second, and today, while I am looking for a third, I realize more than half of my life has been changed and defined outside my home. My friends, (who could be from school, college or work) are now steadily getting hitched. Either they are heavily dating, or they are walking the aisle. It is strange. Not in a bad way, though. The coffee partner I had is now going to get married in a month and is so blissfully dreaming of her life here on that somehow I don’t fit in anymore. The others who are engaged also seem to be looking forward to it than most of the other things in their life.

That leaves me where? I want to spend some more careless evenings with them, I want to know if we will be friends forever, but the equations are changing innocently enough..We no more discuss boys (sigh) or our careers (atleast for sometime to come) and what we discuss is something that keeps my emotional quo just about empty. I am happy for my friends all around me, very much so. But has friendship taken a backseat? Or is it one of those things that change with time and you suddenly realize it after it hits you slowly but effectively?

To me, it matters. But hopefully time will cure me of this ache too.